


Anthem for The Doomed Youth - Wilfred Owen

by sporktato



Series: To Make Poetry of Life [1]
Category: Batman - All Media Types, DCU
Genre: Barbara helps, Character Study, Gotham in Mourning, Inspired by Poetry, Jason has a lot of love and doesn't show it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-30
Updated: 2019-12-30
Packaged: 2021-02-27 13:53:50
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,360
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22028134
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sporktato/pseuds/sporktato
Summary: Jason has an issue with Gotham. No shit. But perhaps, just once, the solution to violence is not more violence. At least that's what the poets would say.
Relationships: Barbara Gordon & Jason Todd, Catherine Todd & Jason Todd, Tim Drake & Dick Grayson & Jason Todd
Series: To Make Poetry of Life [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1585585
Kudos: 52





	Anthem for The Doomed Youth - Wilfred Owen

**Author's Note:**

> This story is heavily inspired by the poem of which it's named, which I suggest you check out. This is the first in what will be a series of Jason-centered stories inspired by poems, as I'm sure Jason would know many himself.  
> Non-graphic mention of past drug use  
> Hope you enjoy!

Jason had brought it up a while ago, after his territory war with Bruce. He had met with Barbara to really voice his current issues with how Gotham was running under Bruce’s rule, in hopes someone would be able to do something about the things prissy playboy millionaires don’t notice. Someone hopefully being Barbara. She had pondered the issue with the same way she ponders battleplans. She had asked him what he wanted as a solution. 

A solution to the fact hundreds of Gothamites die without anyone knowing, too poor, too alone, to have anyone keep them in their memory. The police rule them off as casualties. Bruce puts little thought to the ones he couldn’t save. Who knows about the rest of the Bats. But Jason remembers his mother, because no one else does. Jason remembers the kids that didn’t survive the streets like he did (he says he survived but did he really?) The people Joker kills, and Penguin kills, and Maroney kills, and the blood flowing down Gotham’s streets people like Bruce and Vicki Vale and Jack Rider all step over without a backward glance need to be known. 

He hadn’t expected Barbara to ask for a solution. Fixing things isn’t what he did, he destroyed, or at the very least, pointed out the flaws and let others scramble. He’d froze, sitting in Barbara’s favourite diner with his tea halfway to his lips. How do you memorialize hundreds? How do you tell Gotham it has an issue in the most passive-aggressive way possible? How did Jason want to remember his mother?

_ Now, he sits a little to the north of the WE building, not wanting to see it tonight. He’s halfway through the shwarma he always gets from the joint a block away, waiting. Waiting not for someone he has a target on to pass by underneath, not for thugs to beat up, not for a rapist to stop. He’s waiting to see if Gotham listened to him, and if in turn he would get to listen to her tonight in a way different than he usually does. He flicks his wrist out, checks the time. It’s not too late. It’s not too late for Gotham. It’s up to each person on how they interpret that. _

“What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?” He’d murmured into his nearly drained tea.

“Pardon?” Barbara had asked around her croissant. He’d shook his head, considering not following through on his first thought.

“Nothing. Just a poem. ‘What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?’. A bad idea, probably.” He finally empties his tea as Barbara swallows, looking at him with that look that had made him squirm as Robin. Now he pointedly ignores it.

“What’s the idea? I don’t get poetry.” She picks at the rest of the croissant.

“Passing-bells are funeral bells.” He starts slowly. “I don’t think it’d be a good long term thing, but at least until you think of something better, the Old Gotham Church. I don’t know, like, ring the funeral bells every now and again or something.” He chose that moment to wave down the homey waitress, asking for another cup, lets Barbara take his idea and run with it.

Turning back to face her, her eyes are elsewhere. Maybe in the Cave watching Alfred watch the news as the screens glow orange with buildings turned beacons, maybe in the summer haze of Gotham’s midnights watching Dick risk a life Bruce may not mourn, racing in to save those doomed the minute they were born. Maybe beside the cold grey memory of a mother she barely knew, grass around her ankles like the dead’s fingers grasping for life never lived. They all know death. Some just admit it a little more than others.

The fresh cup rattling against the cheap table brings her back to Jason. “Gotham’s funeral bells rung for Gotham.” Her eyes glint as she steals the first sip of his tea. “Harsh, Jason.” 

He shrugs, slaps her hand and reclaims his cup. “It’s Gotham, O. Harsh’s kinda what we do. But yeah, like I said, probably a bad idea.”

“No.” She starts quickly. “I didn’t say that. Maybe the harshness is what we need.”

_ Jason ignores the black-and-blue and red-and-black duo a few rooftops over. They won’t bother him. He wonders if either know what’s about to happen. He wonders if it will happen. Maybe the dead should stay dead. He figures if that were the case, Gotham wouldn’t listen anyways. He certainly didn’t. Blue fingerstripes wave in his direction. Jason wipes his mouth and is still considering waving back when both of them drop back into the labyrinth. The labyrinth with the Church at the center. Wasn’t the minotaur supposed to be in the middle?  _

They’d left it at that. Barbara had to go to the station to meet with her dad, and Jason had made his way to his favourite hole in the wall used book store. The poem reverberated throughout his memories like the anthem of all desperate and hopeful boys. When he was younger, he had considered getting the line tattooed. He’d considered covering his body with beautiful and tragic words until he became more poem than boy because poems are memorialized when poor boys aren’t, and fuck he didn’t want to be forgotten so badly. Maybe that was why he had suggested the bells. Maybe he still lives too much in worn books written by dead men. Maybe he should just stop thinking about ‘passing-bells for these who die as cattle’. Or just stop thinking altogether.

_ Jason keeps his watch in the corner of his eye as the small second hand winds its way around and around like a dog chasing its tail. He finds he’s holding his breath, but can’t seem to find it being let go. The needle sticks out against the white of the face and suddenly he pictures his mother beside him, her white skin Jason didn’t inherit no longer pallor but a healthy shade, her green eyes sharp like Barbara’s as she stares towards the unmarked grave Jason thinks is hers. It’s the one he leaves flowers at, at the very least. She doesn’t say anything, obviously, she’s dead, a figment of Jason’s fractured imagination, but he takes it upon himself to think that if this works, she’d be proud.  _

_ The first ring scares him out of his reverie, snapping his head away from where he had pictured her standing above him towards the Church. The breath is pushed out of his chest by the ghosts that had taken up residence in his lungs, their swan song as they’re pulled towards the midnight requiem created just for them.  _

_ Near the Church, Jason remotely processes the black-and-blue again. The red-and-black is ghosting through the graveyard. Some admit death exists better than others. Jason’s ears seem muffled to the clanging, which isn’t right. Maybe it’s the shock. Maybe it’s the tears freely running down his cheeks he didn’t notice until the wind drags cool fingers over them, freezing them mid-escape. He loses himself in the repetitive clamour, steady and pulsing as a heartbeat. He pictures ghosts reclaiming the streets below him, sweeping through the city in a windy rolling wave as they finally hear the city calling their names long gone unspoken. This night is for the dead. The dead who died without any reason more than being alive in the first place. There is no monstrous anger in the city in these precious moments, only bells and prayers slipping into the night air Jason had long considered forgotten. He stays frozen in place long after the bells finish, and even after their echoes have gone from his ears. There are figures in streets but Jason cannot discern breathing from buried tonight. His mother eventually tells him to move. To prove he is still alive. That he is not as attracted to the bells as the rest of them. _

_ Dawn is almost rising by the time he makes it back to his bedroom, but he does not draw down the blinds, whether because he is afraid or hopeful he does not know. _


End file.
